Systems and Cultures: Affirmative Action

12Sep

I’ve always wanted to write about systems and cultures (and how they work together or are opposed or reconciled or unreconciled. And I realized, rather than trying to write a huge article about it, I should start with just rough ideas about what I wish to explore.

To me, the notion of systems and cultures are very much like Derrida’s law and justice, Freud’s conscious and unconscious, Postman’s (among others) science and faith. One defines, while the other gets invisibly woven into the fabric of how we perceive the world.

This came up because I had a very short, but fairly intense conversation with my friend, Yvonne, who has just started law school up in Berkeley. She had read an article about affirmative action, which got us thinking about how much race actually plays in a kid’s success in life. When in reality, it’s not race that determines whether or not your kid will succeed in school. It’s everything else. And yet, the system of the school makes it so that it’s race, when in reality, what needs to be changed is the system of values, the prioritization of education in the kid’s home environment. Which is a lot more complicated than saying just that.